Coherent excitation transferring via dark state in light-harvesting process

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dark state quantum interference can enhance energy transfer efficiency in light-harvesting systems, modeling complex donor-acceptor interactions as a simplified three-level system.

Contribution

It demonstrates that dark state EIT effects can optimize energy transfer in bionic light-harvesting structures, providing a new approach to improve photosynthetic efficiency.

Findings

Dark state EIT enhances energy transfer efficiency.

Optimal parameters maximize output power.

Splitting behavior explains dual-color light absorption in photosynthesis.

Abstract

We study the light absorption and energy transferring in a donor-acceptor system with a bionic structure. In the optimal case with uniform couplings, it is found that the quantum dynamics of this seemingly complicated system is reduced as a three-level system of $\Lambda$-type. With this observation, we show that the dark state based electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) effect could enhance the energy transfer efficiency, through a quantum interference effect suppressing the excited population of the donors. We estimate the optimal parameters of the system to achieve the maximum output power. The splitting behavior of maximum power may be used to explain the phenomenon that the photosynthesis systems mainly absorb two colors of light.